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The lowlight of President Obama’s Middle East trip is his strong-arming of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a humiliating apology to Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist government over Israel’s defense in 2010 of its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The blockade was subjected to a terrorist offensive camouflaged as a humanitarian flotilla. The spearhead of the siege was the Mavi Marmara, a vessel controlled by a Turkish jihadist organization, the IHH, that is a part of the Union of Good, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. Due to President Obama’s close relations with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Obama administration has resisted congressional calls to designate the IHH itself as a terrorist organization – sparing itself the embarrassment of noticing the intimate collusion of Erdogan’s ruling Islamist party and the jihadist group.

Nevertheless, the 2010 effort to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas (also a designated terrorist organization) was part of a long-term, ongoing, Islamic-supremacist campaign to break the blockade – an act of war against Israel. The Turkey-driven campaign figures prominently in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy – my new book recently published in paperback by Encounter Books (after initially being available only as an eBook), which thoroughly details why the Islam-supremacist ascendancy in Turkey and Egypt prove the “Arab Spring” democracy narrative to be a fraud. As Spring Fever documents, Erdogan’s government and party, which vigorously backs Hamas, helped design the campaign, supported its prior voyages, orchestrated IHH’s purchase of the Mavi Marmara, jointly plotted the flotilla with IHH, arranged for approximately forty IHH jihadists to board the Mavi Marmara without inspection, ignored Israel’s pleas to prevent the blockade from embarking, and stridently condemned Israel when – as foreseeably as it was intentional – the flotilla’s provocation resulted in a violent confrontation with Israeli defense forces. Turkey’s feigned outrage, which even the pro-Islamist United Nations declined to affirm, is especially risible in light of (a) Erdogan’s open and notorious support of Hamas (which our NATO “ally” denies is a terrorist organization), and (b) Turkey’s own siege, partitioning, and occupation of northern Cyprus.

Two sections of Spring Fever deal with Turkey’s aggression against Israel. What follows here on Ordered Liberty beginning this evening is a two-part series culled from those sections. The first describes IHH: its roots in both terrorism and the Turkish regime, as well as its key role in the anti-blockade aggression. The second is an account of the Mavi Marmara incident.

Despite years of Erdogan’s bombast, the Israeli government — until Friday — steadfastly refused to apologize for exercising its sovereign right of self-defense from the flotilla offensive and from the Hamas terrorism that the blockade has righteously curtailed. The Obama administration’s collaboration with the terror-abetting Turkish government shames our nation and undermines America’s commitment to the rule of law, under which supporting Hamas and the Union of Good are serious felonies. It is abominable that President Obama chose to pressure the Netanyahu government to besot itself by apologizing to Turkey under these circumstances, and just days after Erdogan outrageously called Zionism a “crime against humanity.”